The album Joe Perry compared to a modern Led Zeppelin record
Only a handful of artists can hope to reach the heights of what Led Zeppelin accomplished in the 1970s. Throughout every single record, the band was on an upward trajectory that couldn’t be stopped, with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant working to create some of the most celebrated rock songs in history, like ‘Stairway to Heaven’. While Joe Perry of Aerosmith grew up listening to Zeppelin, he believes one modern act has reached the same sonic peaks as his heroes.
When looking at the music Aerosmith made over their career, it’s easy to see where Zeppelin fit into their vocabulary. Although many of the band’s early reviews ridiculed them for being too close to The Rolling Stones in both sound and presentation, the riffs Perry was spitting out came from the same tradition as early Led Zeppelin, including taking a riff and building different pieces on top of it.
In fact, most of Perry’s signature lines are reminiscent of the pre-Zeppelin outfit, The Yardbirds. Before Page began to embrace the sounds of hard rock, his work in the English blues act made for the biggest blues hits of the time, including the definitive version of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ that Aerosmith covered in their prime.
Like all good rock and rollers, Perry knew that every single great track always came back to the blues. As opposed to the flashy extensions put around the arrangement, the root of every rock song is based around a bluesy vamp, either with the signature shuffle made famous by Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry’s knack for putting three chords together and creating magic.
While rock’s glory days revolved around blues rock acts, the genre seemed to lose its way in the 1980s and 1990s. Although several grunge artists like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam had bluesy foundations behind their songs, the beginnings of nu-metal threw away any of the blues connotations, instead substituting them for making tracks that sounded intentionally discordant.
In an attempt to branch out from his peers, Jack White set out to make something as barebones as possible, working with Meg White to create the first White Stripes record. Although the band were still relatively underground throughout the late 1990s, it wasn’t until albums like White Blood Cells and Elephant that they caught Perry’s attention.
Compared to the other rock bands emerging at the time, Perry thought that the band’s fourth outing could go toe-to-toe with any of Zeppelin’s catalogue, telling Best Life Online, “This album is like listening to a Led Zeppelin record—you just put it on and listen to it and don’t know any of the names of the songs, but you just listen to it over and over. You’re entertained by the stream of consciousness in how they play. They speed up, they slow down. They know their blues roots. They got chops.”
Even though White may have listened to the same bluesmen that Page and Plant did, his Detroit flavour of blues provided something different than any other rock band at the time, from the singalong riff of ‘Seven Nation Army’ to the bluesy freakout halfway through the record on ‘Ball and Biscuit’. White wasn’t looking to impress anyone, but by sticking to his roots, he made a record that stood its ground amongst the legends of rock.
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